Chapter 9 Readying For Winter Cold
The four of them began to spend some whole days and nights up at the lake area, once the two caves were furnished enough to be cozy enough for staying there; and had been provisioned to stay there awhile. So they were not only carrying buckets of sand up, they were carrying food and bedding too.
The winter season was approaching, and all of them were new to the area; had only heard of winter, that it was the time when rain and snow fell to replenished the lake which supplied all the water for the town and its agricultural area.
It was also getting colder there, so they brought up rain gear and warmer clothes. It began to be cloudy and they no longer could use their solar cooker for preparing meals. They had a small rectenna off to the side, and they used it to charge up a capacitor bank, to hold some charge for use between when the non-synchronous satellites were passing by, delivering large amounts of power for a few moments at a time. The capacitor bank was then used to charge up a smaller capacitor to a specific voltage, then turn off the connection; when the small capacitor voltage dropped to 90% of its charge, the connection was automatically turned on to the high voltage large storage capacitor until voltage up to 100%, then connection was disconnected, so the second capacitor became a fairly steady DC power source, for use in recharging the ultrasonic generators and for lighting inside the cave rooms.
Even though the cloud cover was above them, the blasting of the third cave entrance was continuing, the intense focused sunlight beam creating a hole through the clouds for the few seconds it was delivering the energy to shock the cave's wall each time, losing only a little of the energy at at time. The other satellite's occasional beam to charge the power storage capacitor, operated at a frequency that easily passed through the cloud cover.
Geodon prepared a new molding surface for casting doors using the sand, adhesive and ultrasonic triggering process. He made his first one, using the new mold, and using the same hinge technique as on the cabinet doors. He propped the door up into where it would be used, taped a flexible edge around it, and began to build the wall's surface layer by layer to meet the flexible tape around the door. Eventually the wall was completely sealed at least as a first layer, and when ultrasonic adhering the last of it, he opened the door and walked through. The window opening was finished with some window glass brought up from town. It looked like the first cave was ready for winter weather, as much as possible at this point; they did not really know what to expect from the weather yet, however.
The large lake, used as a water supply for agriculture and the town, had a huge amount of water dipped out of it and had been going down for many years already, and yet it looked like the water level was being replenished. That suggested a lot of rain; although could be spread out and trickled in somehow into the lake. They began to wonder about their little lake and the land area they had created around part of it.
Jockly and Juisette were enthusiastic about the cast door idea, and all pitched in to make another one for their cave home too.